[food] serendipity & experimentation
Mar. 15th, 2023 11:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettCourtesy of Veg Boxes we have, still, Beetroot. So Many Beetroot. And also we acquired some fennel. Dithering ensued. Eventually I settled on beetroot, fennel & blood orange salad, but in the process I found smitten kitchen's recipe for fennel ice cream, which she recommends as an accompaniment to pear crisps with vanilla brown butter. It's the wrong sort of fennel, of course -- it's seeds not stems -- but the combination of ingredients plus some reduced double cream means that, obviously, That wound up on the menu too (and in fact is going to be dessert following the salad).
And then! I got to the top of the library hold queue for Meera Sodha's Made In India, which I wanted to borrow virtually not so much because I think digital cookbooks are particularly usable -- they aren't, for me -- but because given how well we're getting on with East I wanted to at least skim it to get an idea about whether it was worth us acquiring a copy.
... it transpires that this, too, contains a recipe for fennel (seed) ice cream! ... using six times as much fennel seed.
So one of the things I did this evening was sit down with the Ruby Violet basic sweetened ice cream mix recipe, and the smitten kitchen fennel ice cream recipe, and the Meera Sodha fennel seed ice cream recipe, and convert all the weights and measures to something consistent, and eyeballed the lot of them. The Ruby Violet recipe has the highest proportion of cream and about half the sugar, and also uses fewer egg yolks -- but Meera Sodha's recommended 2 tbsp of fennel seeds was for 600 ml of dairy, as compared to smitten kitchen's 2 tsp for ~750 ml. I contemplated these facts, decided that I know I like the Ruby Violet base recipe Really A Lot and also I have most of five whites' worth of amaretti relatively recently made and do not need to make another huge batch, so stuck with their proportions for the base mix -- scaled down to leave enough double cream for another round of caramelised orange rice pudding to use the zest from the oranges that'll be going into the salad.
Scaled down, in fact, to 525 ml of dairy, to which I have added... 2 tbsp of fennel seeds. The custard is chilling in the fridge and tasting very promising; tomorrow I'll strain it (because the seeds are Quite A Lot and Quite Crunchy and also both recipes advocate so doing) and churn it and then stick it back in the freezer, and will make the pear crisps while I've the oven on to roast the beetroot and fennel for dinner, and report back on how it's worked and whether (unlikely) I think I should reduce the quantity of fennel seed for the next batch, and indeed whether I think there's likely to be a next batch! But I am optimistic, and pleased and amused at this apparently being The Week For Fennel Ice Cream.
And then! I got to the top of the library hold queue for Meera Sodha's Made In India, which I wanted to borrow virtually not so much because I think digital cookbooks are particularly usable -- they aren't, for me -- but because given how well we're getting on with East I wanted to at least skim it to get an idea about whether it was worth us acquiring a copy.
... it transpires that this, too, contains a recipe for fennel (seed) ice cream! ... using six times as much fennel seed.
So one of the things I did this evening was sit down with the Ruby Violet basic sweetened ice cream mix recipe, and the smitten kitchen fennel ice cream recipe, and the Meera Sodha fennel seed ice cream recipe, and convert all the weights and measures to something consistent, and eyeballed the lot of them. The Ruby Violet recipe has the highest proportion of cream and about half the sugar, and also uses fewer egg yolks -- but Meera Sodha's recommended 2 tbsp of fennel seeds was for 600 ml of dairy, as compared to smitten kitchen's 2 tsp for ~750 ml. I contemplated these facts, decided that I know I like the Ruby Violet base recipe Really A Lot and also I have most of five whites' worth of amaretti relatively recently made and do not need to make another huge batch, so stuck with their proportions for the base mix -- scaled down to leave enough double cream for another round of caramelised orange rice pudding to use the zest from the oranges that'll be going into the salad.
Scaled down, in fact, to 525 ml of dairy, to which I have added... 2 tbsp of fennel seeds. The custard is chilling in the fridge and tasting very promising; tomorrow I'll strain it (because the seeds are Quite A Lot and Quite Crunchy and also both recipes advocate so doing) and churn it and then stick it back in the freezer, and will make the pear crisps while I've the oven on to roast the beetroot and fennel for dinner, and report back on how it's worked and whether (unlikely) I think I should reduce the quantity of fennel seed for the next batch, and indeed whether I think there's likely to be a next batch! But I am optimistic, and pleased and amused at this apparently being The Week For Fennel Ice Cream.